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Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Something old, something old, something borrowed...

It has been a long time since I have seen something that was comepletely new and exciting in a game. More often than not games are just fighting to implement an old idea better than the last time it was trotted out. Darksiders actually one ups this by taking all of its ideas from other places; it is a collection of old ideas, all polished up and put on display with no attempt to hide where they came from. So far there is the general structure of Soul Reaver (which itself stole from Zelda), a hook shot and boomerang also cribbed from Link's arsenal, a portal gun that only works on certain targets, a demon merchant who sounds suspiciously like Watto from The Phantom Menace, collecting souls right out of God of War (which stole the idea from Onimusha, which I really doubt was the first game to use it) and a demon who looks very much like Tim Curry's character from Legend minus the wings. The difference between Darksiders' lovable thievery and, say, Dark Void's abominable copycatting is Darksiders is actually fun to play. All the stolen pieces fit back together into a solid (so far) game.

Side note: I want to see a staring contest between War and Kratos. That shit would be epic.

It's all about enjoying those few hours of gaming I get each day, and as much as I like to complain (and I really like to) it is difficult to come down on Darksiders. I have seen it all before, every bit of it, but it is done so well that the experience becomes a trip down memory lane for people with incredibly short attention spans. No bit of retrospective lasts longer than it should, and then it's on to the next one.

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This blog, in its present form, is a way to force me to not game away all my free time every day in the only way I know how: talk about it instead. Also, I play a lot of crap; read about it here so you don't have to. And if the complaining starts to get out of hand, leave anonymous, hateful comments.